a footnote on the 30th anniversary of the summer of love...

Glenn Smith on the one & only counter-culture:

Turned into fad, the movement was easily marginalized. But not before it launched unprecedented numbers of Americans into lives of nurturance and responsibility, a fact often overlooked by conservatives and their media mimics who like to report that we all turned into hypocritical, thieving stockbrokers. Many, in fact, became health care professionals, social workers, school teachers, environmental scientists, writers, artists, and parents. It may, in the end, have been the less deserving among us who entered politics and public life. The even-less-deserving, of course, became stockbrokers.

Where were you then? In 1967, I was a 7 year-old kid pushing Matchbox cars over unimproved dirt roads of my own making, hunting blue-bellied lizards and horned toads, as well as collecting old snake bones, with Martin Boyarski in the silvery hills of Nevada, and draping my father's Air Force-issue parachute over the clothesline in the back yard, making it a fort. All of which would've made my Summer of Love, uhm, 1978... and then again in 1989... and, geez, there must've been some others too! I guess it all depends on what your definition of Love is.

Today? I'm an aging hippie comic.

This above all, to thine own self be true.